"Golden Eagle" in Arenac Co - not

[Santner, Steven]

	After our sighting of what we thought was a Golden Eagle with
unusual plumage characteristics that Darlene Friedman and I saw in
Arenac Co Sunday, Darlene sent her photos off to Jeff Schultz who in
turn sent them off to another hawk ID expert (she told me who but I
can't remember who it was).  Their consensus is that the bird is an
immature Bald Eagle.  I'm told that Bald Eagle immatures have wider
wings than adults and can appear to have the short headed, long tailed
appearance of Golden Eagle.  The white patches did extend onto the wing
linings which I'm told completely eliminates Golden Eagle.  It's still a
puzzling bird to me as I've never seen a Bald Eagle with such a well
defined tail band.  However, given the time of year, the fact that there
were numerous other Bald Eagles in this area, and the fact that the
plumage doesn't match up very well with Golden Eagle either, I'm
inclined to believe that it was just a Bald Eagle.

	Steve Santner
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.envirolink.org/pipermail/mich-listers/attachments/20080603/e3e6ce63/attachment.html